Author: Shigeki Editor: Zhu Jieshu
Robert Mapplethorpe (November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1989) was born in his time. In the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in New York, where Maplethorpe's artistic career began, the rebellious, broken, gloomy atmosphere and awakening of the consciousness of sexual minorities resonated with Itplethorpe beautifully and appropriately. So when we watch his beautiful and eerie and out-of-the-ordinary photographic works, we are also feeling the shocks and upheavals of an era through them.
The French architect Le Corbusier once said: "Light and shadow make things take shape." "For Mapplethorpe's life, less than half a century of life and a shorter creative process were accompanied by an extremely dazzling light and a shadow as dark as the abyss. When the unrestrained and rebellious 1960s and 1970s ended, the conservative 1980s faded away many of the once-glorious ones. The aids pandemic, the biggest "plague" of the second half of the 20th century, brought the heaviest deaths to gay men like Maplethorpe.
Although there was a literary theory of "the author is dead" in France, for Mapplethorpe and his photographic art, which was active in the second half of the 20th century, we have to understand the artist's life, his life course, his role throughout the period, and the factors that played in art as a result. In Maplethorpe's field of photographic art—portrait, floral, and sexuality—they are all bound together by the same artistic conceptions, so that they form a whole in themselves, revealing his knowledge of the self, art, and the times full of noise and turmoil.
Through Patti Smith's tender and mournful memoir, Just Kids, we learn that they met on the streets of New York in 1967 and lived together for years thereafter. Smith also reminds us that Maplethorpe was aware of his sexuality a year later. He then traveled to San Francisco, which was also a self-searching trip. This specific time is mentioned in order to place Mapplethorpe's life in a broader context. In June 1969, the comrades in stone wall wine in Greenwich Village, New York, rioted because they could not stand the surprise inspection and harassment of the police, which opened the prelude to the modern gay movement in the United States. Maplethorpe, who was staying at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, could not have been ignorant of the matter, especially as he was gradually entering the "factory" art circle of "Pope Pop" Warhol.
It may not be a coincidence that Maplethorpe developed a fumbling of his own sexuality at this time. As Smith puts it in his book, "He needs to explore himself, to explore his own creative language." It is no accident that Smith puts exploration with artistic creation here, but rather that she realizes that Maplethorpe's art is largely a response to her own doubts and explorations. Before beginning to use Polaroid cameras for photography, he had explored many other art forms, whether traditional paintings on the shelf or collages, sculptures or installations, etc., but these forms failed to become the main medium of his artistic creation, which had something to do with his self-confusion at that time. Patti Smith writes: "His work began to change, and all indications of his repressed gender identity were indicative. He never revealed to me his wavering sexuality, and I realized later that he was struggling painfully with his desires, trying to liberate nature. ”
For children born into an ordinary Catholic family in the United States in the 1940s, both sexual and "abnormal" sexual desires were suppressed and tightly controlled. After World War II, American society has undergone a process of re-normalization/mainstreaming, that is, with the return of male soldiers during the war, on the one hand, women and ethnic minorities (such as blacks) who have already worked have faced resignation; on the other hand, the shaping and emphasis on traditional family values, gender temperament and gender ethics have also led to women being tied to the family again, and all sexual and sexual behavior between "non-husband and wife" has been stigmatized and suppressed.
This is the social background in which Maplethorpe grew up. Recalling where he grew up in the 1980s, he said, "I came from the outskirts of the United States, where there was a very safe environment. And "very safe" means not only for the child's growth, but also for the perfect place for the reproduction of mainstream ideology. So when Maplethorpe saw those sealed gay erotic prints in front of the newsstand, the strong impact could be imagined. Perhaps it is this tension between the ideas of growing acceptance and the suppressed desires that create the erotic themes and implications of Maplethorpe's photography that are unique and often surprising.
If we follow Freud's theory of the sublimation of the artist's desires, Maplethorpe clearly fits this logic very well. He himself pointed out in an interview: "I was deeply troubled by these magazines in front of the newsstand, because the magazines are all sealed, so it seems more sexy and attractive, you can't touch them... My desires were infinitely elevated, but not directly related to sex, but a mysterious attraction. I thought I could transform it into an art while retaining the allure of it, and I thought I could do something extraordinary on my own. With his return from San Francisco, in the late 1970s, the artist created the X-Group series of works about the various sadomasochistic cultures (bdsm) of the New York underground at the time, which caused great controversy by bluntly expressing themes of sex and homosexuality. Until the 1980s, Maplethorpe's work caused the famous "cultural war" at the time, and conservative politicians in the United States criticized the National Endowment for the Arts for sponsoring such obscene works that were contrary to customs and customs, which led many politicians and evaluators to be involved in this discussion.
For cities as large as Gay Subcultures like New York and San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s, The themes of Maplethorpe's works were commonplace. But for mainstream American society, it was as unpleasant as the gradually emerging gay movement, subverting and destroying the prevailing social concepts and ideologies at that time. This group of works by Mapplethorpe and the "floating historical surface" of sexual minorities form a corresponding effect. The rise to the door of sex, groups, and behaviors that were once stigmatized, called perverted and depraved, are now the subjects of art, a political ploy in themselves, as were the actions of "pride" and "coming out" advocated by the standard-bearers of The San Francisco Javier Milk at the time, in order to remove the stigma of the gay community and reconstruct the self-identity of the gay minority by traditional religions and modern sciences such as spiritual and psychological science.
According to Patty Smith's recollection, Maplethorpe was at war with heaven and man for his sexuality and desires. He eventually accepts himself and tells Patty, who has been dating for years, still worried that the only girl he ever loved will alienate him. In the 1970s, Maplethorpe's photographs involving sexual minorities were, in a way, the completion of his identification with his own sexual orientation, which led to the heyday of creation in the 1980s.
In Maplethorpe's photography, selfies have been taken throughout his career. If we look at these selfies according to the clues of time, we will find that they are also the artist's cognition and observation of the self. In Maplethorpe's selfie work, from the once hippie-like image of the prodigal son, to the yin-yang hybrid image of the mid-term women's clothing, and the eerie but sincere, even somewhat indifferent images in the final stages of his life, the artist's gaze on the self runs through.
Perhaps a "marginal" like Mapplethorpe—whether it's his sexual orientation, the subject matter of his photography and the erotic implications of it, and the identity of the artist itself—the question of the artist's life is where he is in this society and ideology full of "normal", "mainstream" and disciplined? Who is he?
Throughout Maplethorpe's life's art, "sex" runs through it, both in terms of theme and thought. The reason why "sex" in Mapplethorpe's photography has caused so much controversy (and even spreads to this day) is largely due to the groups to which these "sexes" belong, and the artist's treatment of these "sexes".
In Western classical art theory, there is a seemingly clear boundary between beauty and eroticism, but it is actually very vague, and one thing that is more noteworthy is that in Western classical art, eroticism is always like a shadow with nude painting, and the "security" of nude painting is completely built on the obscuration or intentional concealment of its erotic connotation. This traditional trick was perfectly exposed in several of Manet's works at the end of the 19th century, most notably Olympia. In the controversy caused by Olympia, if we ignore this part of the critic's criticism of Manet with classical painting techniques and ideas, what remains is what the American art historian T.J. Clark pointed out in his Portrait of Modern Life, that the image of the prostitute in Olympia not only fails to obscure its existence as traditional nude painting, but magnifies its existence to some extent. The viewer no longer appreciates just a nude image of "beauty", but a living woman with sex (desire).
In the early 20th century, the young Austrian painter Schiller was tried by a court for sexual attention to his paintings. In Schiller's paintings, we see real sex and sexual desire, not something that has been suppressed or deliberately hidden. In Mapplethorpe's photographs, sex is also unconcealed: part of it is the sex and sexuality of the sadomasochistic groups he photographed in his early years, and the documentary nature of photography makes these underground sexes real, and with the help of photography's "reflection of reality" (Susan Sontag pointed out in her famous book "On Photography", published in 1977, the photographic image is self-contained, shaping a world about the image, and trying to replace the real world), the viewer can be imagined The other part is derived from the artist's meticulously designed and posed body photography of the 80s, in which sex is also not hidden.
The core of These raw works of Maplethorpe's early works focused on "sex", with a very distinct provocation and subversion. In a way, they bear a striking resemblance to the work of Finland's tom of Finland, a famous gay male erotic painter of the 1940s and 1950s. It is worth mentioning that the works of Tom of Finland were banned in the country, and many of his works were published in a gay magazine in San Francisco, which directly affected the birth and development of the gay leather community in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s. Mapplethorpe traveled to San Francisco in the late 1960s, and since then, he has seen many leather-clad men in his work (he also has several selfies in leather coats), and I wonder if he was also influenced by Finnish Tom?
In Maplethorpe's body photography, his obsessive pursuit of "perfection in form" does not suppress content, but elevates it to a typical level. In this case, whether it is a black male body or a female body, the "sex" created by the dual combination of femininity and masculinity is idealized, which is different from the fierce, straightforward sex of its early days.
The "perfect form" in Mapplethorpe's photographs is not only related to a certain sense of idealism in the artist's personality, but may also be related to the turn of modern art that was emerging in the United States at that time. With the "World War II" postmodern art center from Paris to New York, modern art theory in the United States also began to flourish. In 1961, Clement Greenberg published art criticism collection Art and Culture, which escorted modernist art, especially represented by New York's Abstract Expressionism, emphasizing artistic autonomy and the pursuit of art's own form. We don't know if Maplethorpe understood Greenberg's theory, but his exploration of form has some connection to mainstream American art in the 1960s and 1970s.
On the other hand, the form in Mapplethorpe's photographs is not only modern, it also exudes a strong classical aesthetic characteristics. In Winkelmann's analysis of ancient Greek sculpture, he proposes a classic statement to summarize the characteristics of these works of art, namely "noble simplicity, silent greatness", which is similar to The Photography of the Body at the peak of the 1980s by Maplethorpe. The human bodies in these works have delicate light and shadow, classical shapes and elegant forms, some of which are deliberately designed on pedestals to imitate classical sculptural forms... This is also evident in his floral collections, where the "perfection" created by these delicate poses creates a certain tension between his subject on the one hand, and on the other hand, it vaguely reflects a certain psychological state of the artist himself.
Although the artist himself has repeatedly pointed out that the reason for his interest in the subject of flowers is its strangeness, we still cannot ignore the hidden sexual meaning. Flowers have been an important subject in photography since the 19th century, but in the 1970s and 1980s, most photographers in the United States have abandoned it. In this regard, The difference between Maplethorpe is again expressed, and what is even more different is that he has carefully arranged these flowers to make them a series of images and symbols, and begin to carry meanings beyond themselves.
The first is a certain "perversion" produced by the delicacy caused by the theme of flowers and perfect forms, that is, these originally beautiful flowers and works of art, while arousing aesthetic pleasure, also give rise to a certain anxiety and melancholy. What causes this is the "excess" characteristic unique to Mapplethorpe's work, which has (or seems to have) transcended perfection and begun to overflow, forming the aesthetic saturation of the work, causing a certain toxicity and corrosiveness, and even a sense of mannerism. It's like the picture of Oscar Wilde in his novel The Portrait of Dowling Gray that is too perfect and rotten.
This is followed by the sexual meaning of flowers. Through Maplethorpe's meticulous use of form, light and colour, the sex displayed by these flowers is both perfect and at the same time eerie and unsettling. To a certain extent, they seem to be detached from the specific social context and ideology in which they were born, and on the other hand, they inevitably form a tension with the emerging sexual conservatism of the 80s because of their surrounding sex. Compared with the artist's early "sex", the elaborately designed "sex" here has become relatively safe and detached. As a result, The Morep's collection gained more praise for its photographic technique and art, rather than the controversy and protest of sex and eroticism as in the early days.
In 1985, Maplethorpe took two selfies of himself: one with a horn on his head, a rare use of the baselight to take a vicious face, a miserable look, as if possessed by a demon; the other shot with a slow shutter and flash: the moment he turned his head, his eyes were melancholy, his hairline was sparse, and he was old... The following year, he was diagnosed with HIV.
The 1980s was a harsh winter for sexual minorities "on the surface of history", and the emergence of AIDS and the series of disease metaphors and stigmas constructed around it led to the double pressure on the gay and lesbian community: the further hostility and repression of mainstream society, the disregard of conservative government departments (the Reagan administration in the United States, the Thatcher government in the United Kingdom), and the rapid and fatal complications of AIDS, which led to the decline of many young lives. One of the founders of the new York radical gay organization Act Up, dramatist Larry M. Larry Kramer once said in an interview: "After the '80s, many of my friends died! In the film "Ordinary Heart", based on the play of the same name, the misfortune and hardship of the gay and lesbian community in this "cholera" period are shown.
As Susan Sontag points out in her book The Metaphor of Disease, since ancient times people have constructed a series of metaphors for disease, especially large infectious diseases such as plague and cholera, mixed with complex social, political, economic, religious, and moral factors. AIDS is also not immune, with conservative forces calling it "gay cancer"; religious forces advertise that this is God's punishment for the depravity of sexual minorities; others believe that this is the self-inflicted result of the sexual promiscuity lifestyle chosen by the gay community... Individuals infected with HIV are fundamentally excluded from society, and the heavy stigma causes infected people to have to endure multiple stressors, resulting in psychological and spiritual suffering.
It was in the midst of the uproar that Maplethorpe's horned selfie in 1985 had an almost proverbial implication that comrades like him (and hive) were once again metaphorically referred to as the devil. In this selfie, there is no exquisite light and perfect form in the heyday, only a straightforward image and gaze, staring at the camera. This form has continued in several selfies since Maplethorpe, especially the last selfie taken a year before his death: the black-and-white protagonist is dressed in black, holding a skeleton cane, and the body, arms and background are integrated, revealing only the bright head and cane, no other details, and the large area of darkness is unforgettable.
In the Western tradition, there is a long tradition of making death faces, and This selfie portrait of Maplethorpe is more like making yourself into a death mask in advance, becoming the god of death. On the other hand, it seems to be a metaphor: in this "cholera" storm, the whole world sees them — homosexuals living with HIV — as the devil, the depraved and the other, thus turning their faces to their suffering and misfortune, and speaking ill of them without conscience and moral condemnation. But this selfie by the artist presents a very different image: a living person facing the camera, facing the viewer, death is about to fall on him.
The minimalist and black-and-white contrast of the picture shows the tenacity, sincerity and courage of the protagonist in the work. To some extent, The "casualness" of The Late Mapplethorpe's late self-portraits emerges from the "casualness" of the earlier works, and although the design and form have become more natural, the present and the scene in them reappear, thus making these works more intimate and intimate with the viewer.
In these selfies, we find that along the way, the artist is no longer the young boy who is confused and scared by his sexual orientation, but has a clear consciousness of who he is and what he should do. Audiences had called him the "Prince of Darkness," and eventually Maplethorpe enjoyed the label as much as he enjoyed gay status and same-sex lust. This is also a very attractive part of his art: he transforms the despised and stigmatized people, images and desires into beautiful beings that can be admired and enjoyed through his photography.
Accept yourself and turn all that ugliness, pain, and humiliation into art. As his soul mate Patti Smith put it in Just a Child: "Robert dabbled in the darkness of human nature and transformed it into art... He was showing something new, something different from what he had seen and explored, and had not yet been seen and explored. This is the most fascinating and curious thing that exists in Mapplethorpe's photographs, whether controversial or perfectly formed.
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